General aviation continues to grow in the U.S. and pilots are just as eager as terrestrial drivers to make the homes for their favorite conveyances as AV-cool as possible.
Ultimate Installations, in Torrance, CA, has his shop and showroom on the grounds of the Woodley Airport in nearby North Long Beach.
Jason Morgan, owner of Ultimate Installations, in Torrance, CA, has his shop and showroom on the grounds of the Woodley Airport in nearby North Long Beach. The demo theater occupies the downstairs portion of a two-story hangar and is fitted with a 100-inch (diagonal) Stewart Filmscreen screen illuminated by a Toshiba TS80 projector and has a 5.1 surround audio array that uses Tannoy Signature Series speakers and a Ken Goerres custom subwoofer, all powered by a Yamaha RX V3800 AV receiver.
Understandably, acoustical isolation is a challenge at an airport. Morgan used Suppress Products’ sound-engineered drywall for the theater’s interior walls, which uses inlaid resin layers to absorb and deflect acoustical energy from the outside. ASC bass traps and absorption panels control the sound inside. A Furman IT-Reference 15i discrete symmetrical power source handles parallel power conditioning to offset the occasionally spiky AC at the airport.
“From the outside, you’d never know there was a full-blown home theater in there,” Morgan says of the tin-walled hangar.
In suburban Seattle, Dave Brown, operations manager for Intuitive Integration, says the first thing he checked was the client’s sanity when he told him that he wanted the garage in his house to be shared by both a theater and a helicopter.
In suburban Seattle, Dave Brown, operations manager for Intuitive Integration, says the first thing he checked was the client’s sanity when he told him that he wanted the garage in his house to be shared by both a theater and a helicopter.
“He would fly the helicopter to a tiny pad in front of the garage between the lake and the house and then had a powered jack that would lift the helicopter, and he would walk it in to his garage,” Brown said. “It was pretty cool.”
With the Hughes MD-500 helicopter outside of the garage, the client’s friends can hang out on the back lawn and dock while a Runco LS-3 projector plays out on either a Draper 110 inch motorized drop-down screen on the rear wall, or projects directly onto a side wall of the garage, depending upon the weather, thanks to a custom-made swivel mount for the projector. Audio is provided by two pairs of SpeakerCraft OE 8 Three speakers mounted in stereo for the two projection surfaces, powered by an Integra AV receiver that is tied into the Request whole-house music system.
Apocalypse Now will likely be a regular feature.
